Word: explains
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...There never was a good war or a bad peace," Benjamin Franklin wrote to Josiah Quincy in 1773, expressing a simple truth that helps explain why Americans cheer so loudly as the victorious soldiers march through the center of town, leaving behind a trail of limp ticker tape, burst balloons -- and grumbling pundits. Some people will carp at the giddy excess and point out that the U.S. is cheering while the gulf still burns. They may be overlooking something that has changed in the way Americans think about themselves and what their country has achieved...
...celebrations also welcome the return of American competence, which may explain why the parades include weapons as well as soldiers. "We tested our war machinery, and we know we have the most sophisticated war machine in the world today," says Ben Perkins, a union organizer in Detroit who personally opposed the war from the start. "We've got a new sense of patriotism, and I guess that's good, but that was a hell of a price...
...deserted stretch of shoreline on a radioactive lake is not the ideal place to argue the merits of building a new nuclear power plant. This may explain why V.I. Fetisov, director of the Mayak nuclear-waste processing plant near Chelyabinsk, had little to say to the large man with silvery hair and thundering voice. "It doesn't seem to me," said the presidential candidate, "that we should build a power station of the type they had in mind. Absolutely not. Do you want to stick an atom bomb right next to Chelyabinsk...
Perhaps evil is an immanence in the world, in the mind, just as divinity is an immanence. But evil has performed powerful works. Observes Russell: "It is true that there is evil in each of us, but adding together even large numbers of individual evils does not explain an Auschwitz, let alone the destruction of the planet. Evil on this scale seems to be qualitatively as well as quantitatively different. It is no longer a personal but a transpersonal evil, arising from some kind of collective unconscious. It is also possible that it is beyond the transpersonal and is truly...
...script for such dubious scenes as one in which Ferrie is murdered by two mysterious figures who force medicine down his throat. (The New Orleans coroner ruled that Ferrie died of natural causes, though two apparent suicide notes were found.) Lardner also ridiculed the film's attempt to explain away Garrison's botched prosecution of Shaw by inventing a Garrison aide who turns out to be a mole for the Feds aiming to sabotage the case...